Kinky Kickstarters and Crowdfunded Cane Strokes

Ever since that guy made $55,000 crowdfunding a potato salad on Kickstarter, I have wanted to write about crowdfunding campaigns. And now that there’s a hot BDSM-themed one, I have the perfect excuse.

Crowdfunding is awesome in so many ways, primarily because it gives creative people a way to test whether there’s demand for their revolutionary new idea without having to take a huge gamble on it. And now, it appears, it is also a pretty cool way to raise money for charity and make hot porn.

You heard that right.

Pandora Blake and Nimue Allen – couple of awesome feminist porn producers (full disclosure: they also happen to be my mates, so naturally I am predisposed towards admiring their brilliance) – have set up an Indiegogo funding campaign, in which they’ll take a hard cane stroke for every tenner they raise, then film the results and release them online.

Why are they putting themselves through this? Well, they’re raising money for the charity Backlash, which is fighting the changes to the UK porn laws which came into force in December. There’s some background on the Indiegogo page, but the digest version is that the UK film censor has decided that British producers should no longer be able to make porn that includes things like facesitting, female ejaculation, and spanking which goes beyond ‘transient and trifling.’

So, canes make the film censors nervous, so the kind of beating Pandora and Nimue will be taking in their crowdfunded video will probably cause the censor to faint, or at the very least have to go for a lie down.

While Kickstarter has some pretty strict rules about what can and can’t be funded (and – surprise surprise! – sexy stuff is usually forbidden), Indiegogo is much more chilled about the whole thing. Let’s have a look at some of the weirder (and sexier) campaigns that have been funded through Indiegogo…

Bionic strap on

The amazingly-titled ‘Orgasmatronics Inc’ set up a crowdfunder for their ‘bionic strap-on’ which sounds pretty cool when you imagine it, but seems a bit disappointing in real life. It’s essentially a strap-on vibrator that responds to touch. Someone can rub it, and there’ll be a toy that touches you which vibrates to try and correspond with the touch. To be honest, I’d rather have a plain old strap on so I can focus on the shagging, but countless thousands disagreed with me, and the product has now achieved double the funding target. It’s in production, and you can see the demo video below.

Heated sex toys

Fronted by Gaz and Charloitte from Geordie Shore (no, I don’t know either), this toy touted its revolutionary heating element as a key selling point. Initially a bit unsure – I’m not sure I want to put it inside me if it’s going to burn? – I can actually see the appeal of the idea, as long as there’s a safety cut out.

Date a hipster guy

This one’s so recent that you can still chip into it, if you are a particular kind of masochist. The internet exploded with ridicule earlier last week when a hipster guy called Tom revealed that he was looking to ‘crowdfund love.’ You heard that right – he’s asking people to donate money to help him find the woman of his dreams.

Unfortunately, he hasn’t really thought this thing through, because although he’s decided that one lucky woman will be taken to Paris, it’s clear from the way his donations are set up that she only gets to go to Paris with him if she’s the one who’s paid for it. If your budget doesn’t stretch to Paris, you can date this romantic old so-and-so for a mere one hundred pounds.

So there you have it – crowdfunded cane strokes, hipster dating, and revolutionary new sex toys. Who wouldn’t love a bit of sexy crowdfunding? Although I’ve got to say, I much prefer the cane strokes to the prospect of a date with Tom.

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